Vacations From Hell (12 page)

The cellar was a raw old place, very small, with walls made of stones cemented together. It smelled like earth and was absolutely freezing cold. It looked like Henri mostly used it to develop film. There was a table of trays, shelves of chemicals, a clothesline of drying prints—most of them of trees and the mountains. There were also a few sacks of potatoes and onions, some bottles of wine, some homemade preserves on a different shelf, along with a few rounds of cheese in plastic containers. There were some shovels and garden implements in the corner. Henri’s life had been so pleasant, so normal until recently.

“Let me find some blankets,” I said. “And a coat.”

“Be quick,” he said.

I found an afghan on the sofa, a jacket in the hall, and took the rain slicker. I used them all to make a kind of nest for my unconscious, bound sister and helped Gerard carry her down the stairs. I tuck her in as carefully as I could as he lashed her to one of the supporting beams. I left the flashlight there, pointed up, to give her some light. Then we trudged back up the steps and shut the door, putting the beam across it.

“Is this really necessary?” I asked.

“Is what necessary?” Gerard asked. He had picked
the gun back up and was examining it.

“Locking her in the basement. Can’t we just keep her up here?”

“Eet is better to keep her there. She is dangerous now. In the morning we will release her.”

It made sense. Kind of. As much sense as anything could make. I looked down at poor Henri, his crumpled body on the floor.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Gerard looked up at me and smiled.

Okay. So we made out on the couch for an hour. I don’t think it’s fair for anyone to be judging me. Yes, I know. Dead guy. Sister tied up in basement. I know, I know. But there was nothing else to do except watch
Mission: Impossible
in French. They say that stressful situations bring people together. It’s true. No, it’s really true. I’m sure there’s something in the
DSM-IV
about it.

So yes. Couch, dark living room, rain outside, French countryside…the rest of the picture sounds right, doesn’t it? We had just paused because our lips had gone a little numb when we heard Marylou screaming in the basement.

“She is awake,” Gerard said calmly, stroking my hair.

I buried my head into his chest and put my hands
over my ears, but nothing drowned it out. She was screaming my name over and over.

“Can’t we let her out?” I asked. “We have the gun. We can tie her up in the kitchen where it’s warm. She’s going to need water and food….”

“She will be fine,” he said. There was a firmness to his voice I didn’t like.

“She can’t hurt us,” I said, sitting up. “There are two of us. I’m not saying that we let her run around, but…”

“You have no idea what she can do.”

In the dark all I could see was the outline of his hair, his bright eyes. His hand was on my leg. I felt his fingers tighten and tense.

“The infection,” he said, “you do not understand. You do not know what eet does. You have no idea. I have seen what eet does. That is not your sister right now, Charlie. She was gone by the time you got to the part about the guillotine.”

“The part about what?”

“The part about the guillotine.”

I went back through my mind, back to the moment where I was standing there with Henri and he was talking and talking and I asked to use his bathroom…. He had never said anything about a guillotine. I’d cut him off. I never got the whole story.

Which meant that possibly…possibly I had never been infected. I had never passed it on to Marylou.

But Gerard seemed to know a lot about this Law of Suspects thing.

And he was sounding calmer and calmer, the tone stripped from his voice, just like it had been from Henri’s. But Gerard would never let himself listen to the story….

Gerard had been tied up in a chair, alone with Henri. Helpless.

His fingers flexed again. He was staring at me in the dark, his expression unmoving.

“Right,” I said, trying to sound cool. “That part. That was the
freakiest
part.”

I couldn’t take Gerard, not physically. All I had was the gun, and I was not going to shoot him. We hadn’t known each other long, but I liked him. He was a good person. He had almost gotten himself killed trying to protect me.

“I was thinking,” I said. “The car. We should really check the car. I’ll bet there’s enough gas. Henri was probably lying about that.”

“Where is there to go?”

“To town!” I said.

“There is no point.”

“I’d feel better if we just looked,” I said. “I’ll just go and check. It’ll take two seconds.”

I felt his hands moving to grab my arm, but I got up first.

“And I’ll get us something to eat!” I said as cheerfully as I could. “Something besides onions!”

I hurried to the kitchen and fumbled around for the switch. We had turned the lights off because the sight was so horrible. I couldn’t find the switch, so I made my way to the table in the dark and grabbed the gun. I had to move it. Hide it. Somehow get it out of the picture. But I got exactly nowhere, because Gerard was behind me in a moment.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

If there was ever a moment to lie, this was it.

“God,” I said. “I tripped and
fell
on this. I tripped over his
leg
! God. This is so messed up!”

I staggered away, the gun still in my hands, but I continued making noises of general upset and confusion. It helped that Marylou was still screaming away.

“You should give me that,” Gerard said quietly.

I stepped over Henri and put my back up against the cellar door, pointing the gun at him.

“I can’t,” I said. “Please, Gerard. Don’t make me hurt you.”

“Charlie? What are you…”

He sounded so confused, his little French accent peaking on my name. Like he was struggling with something inside himself.

“He told you the story,” I said. “When you were in the chair. Didn’t he? You couldn’t help it. You couldn’t get away.”

“Eet gets only one person,” he replied. “Eet has your sister.”

“It doesn’t have my sister. It has you. You know it. Please, Gerard.”

He stepped closer.

“I have been hunting rabbits all my life,” he said. “I can shoot very well. Give eet to me. I will protect both of us.”

In the dark my fingers were feverishly trying to find the safety. I didn’t even want them to. They looked for it on their own. Gerard stepped forward and put his hand over the barrel.

“Charlie,” he said. “Eet is me. Eet is Gerard. Do not shoot me. Don’t listen to eet.”

“It hasn’t got me, Gerard! I never heard the end of the story! Now back off….”

And then my fingers found the safety. And I fired. And Gerard fell.

“Oh wait,” I said to myself. “He did mention a guillotine. How did I forget that?”

Here’s the thing….

God. It’s hard to explain. I get so confused now. I start talking and I just forget what I’m saying halfway
through. I think it’s all the meds I’m on. I pop pills all day long. They try all different combinations. Some work better than others. Today is one of the better days. I’m clear enough that they let me use the computer. The computer is usually way off-limits. I think they think I’m going to try to eat the keyboard or something.

They tell me it’s been three months since I got here, since it all happened. It feels like two weeks or something, but I just looked out the window and all the leaves are off the trees. There’s a splattered pumpkin at the end of the long drive, so I guess Halloween is either coming or it’s already come and gone.

So I guess you want to know what happened?

As I remember it, I shot Gerard, and then a second or two later there was this massive cracking noise, like thunder, coming from inside my head. Everything went dark. According to the reports, if Gerard hadn’t put his hand over the stupid barrel he probably would have been fine, but as it was I blew it off. I dropped the gun. He managed to keep himself together long enough to pick it up and club me with it with his remaining hand.

I woke up in the hospital. Marylou was there, holding my hand and telling me it would all be okay. Then I passed out again. I was unconscious a lot. Awake a bit in the hospital in France. Awake for a moment or two in the wheelchair at the airport. I do remember Gerard coming to see me before I left. His handless arm was in a
sling. I was pretty out of it at the time, but he didn’t look angry. I think he even stroked my hair.

The coroner determined that Henri actually did kill himself (powder on his hands or something). They found the rest of his wife’s body exactly where Gerard said it was, along with ample evidence that Henri was the one who killed her. The dog was buried with her. This left the slightly more baffling problem of why one boy from the village and two American tourists ended up in a bloody confrontation in his house: one bound in the basement, another with no hand, a third unconscious on the kitchen floor. That this happened three days after a gruesome murder-suicide was even more troubling.

The final analysis was: Gerard was the hero, the one who noticed the disappearance of Henri’s wife and kept watch over the house to see if anything suspicious was going on. When the two American tourists (us) came stumbling by, Gerard moved in to protect us. Flooded with guilt, Henri took his own life. And I, conveniently, lost my mind.

As to why this all happened at the same exact time, the local police had no idea—but several psychologists took a crack at figuring it out.

Based on my lying about Gerard attacking me, beating my sister over the head with a DVD player, shooting Gerard…it was determined that I had had a psychotic break. I wound up in a mental hospital just outside of
Boston. (“That’s not what we like to call it,” said Marylou. “It’s a psychological rehabilitation facility.”)

Now that I can access my e-mail, I see that Gerard sent me a message every single day. The first ones were really short, but as he got used to typing with the one hand he was able to say a lot more. He’s the only person in the world who doesn’t think I belong here. He can’t wait until they let me out, which sounds like it won’t be for a while. He says he’s going to come and visit, just as soon as he’s been fitted with the prosthetic hand.

And I just read Marylou’s e-mail…the one with the link to her award-winning psych paper that she feels will secure her a place in one of the best grad programs. I read it. It detailed every aspect of the case.

Including the entire Law of Suspects story.

Including the part about the guillotine.

I’m logging off now and going back to my room. And I am going to ask them to up my meds. I like it here, nice and safe, with no sharp things and everyone all locked up. It is, as Gerard would say, better than the alternative.

CASSANDRA CLARE

T
he two hours of washboard dirt road between the airport in Kingston and the tiny town of Black River would be bad enough even if I wasn’t hung over from all that wedding champagne. As it is, I spend most of the time staring out the window and trying not to throw up. It isn’t easy, especially since we keep passing dead animals on the side of the road and sometimes piles of burning garbage that stink like hot plastic.

My mom said Jamaica was going to be a paradise. But then again, this is the same woman who insisted that she and Phillip needed to leave for their honeymoon the morning after the wedding. Why they decided they had to bring me and Evan, Phillip’s son, along with them on their trip, I’m not sure. They explained it to me—or at least my mom had, with Phillip sitting there glowering
like he always did—as something about “family togetherness.” But with Phillip dead silent as always and Evan scrunched up as far away from me as he can get on the van’s sticky bench seat, I’m not sure how much togetherness we’re really going to achieve. Of course, given what happened in the garden last night after the reception, togetherness is probably the last thing that Evan and I need.

The villa my mother has rented is much more beautiful than it looked in the online photos. The floors are shiny, dark as the polished outside of a walnut shell; the walls are blue, sponge-painted with a wash of green, calling up the colors of the sea and sky. One whole wall is missing, just open to the deck outside, the turquoise swimming pool and the cliff falling away to the white sand and dark sea beyond. The sun has just begun to set, casting widening rings of red, gold, and bronze over the water.

My mother stands in the arch of the doorway, her hand against her throat. “Oh, Phillip…look!”

But Phillip isn’t looking. He’s over by the front door with the pile of bags, speaking to Damon, the bellboy, in a low, gruff voice. Something about how Damon shouldn’t be expecting a tip and anyway he could have carried his own damn luggage. Damon shrugs his white-shirted shoulders, philosophical, and leaves, stepping past Evan, who is leaning against the wall, staring down
at his shoes. I can tell he’s embarrassed by his father, but when I try to smile at him, his glance away from me looks like a flinch.

Phillip looks over at me. Maybe he sees the expression on my face—I’m not sure—but either way he still reads me all wrong. “Evan,” he says, “take Violet’s bags to her room.”

Evan starts to protest. His father shoots him a look of disgust.

“Now, Evan.”

Evan hoists the duffel over his shoulder and follows me to the room marked 3. It has louvered windows that look out over the deck, a skylight, and a huge white bed canopied with drifts of mosquito netting. Evan sets the bag on the floor with a bang and straightens up, his blue eyes flashing.

“Thanks,” I say.

He shrugs. “Not a problem.” I watch him as he glances around, watch the way the muscles in his shoulders move as he turns. “Nice room.”

“I know.” I laugh nervously. “The bed is huge.”

The moment the words are out of my mouth, I freeze. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t even have said the word
bed
around Evan, not after what happened in the rose garden. He’ll think I’m joking, being stupid, or he’ll think I’m asking him—

“Guys! Dinnertime!” My mom pops her head
around the door, smiling brightly. I’ve never been so glad to see her.

“I’ll be right there—I just need to wash my hands.” I duck into the small bathroom while Evan skulks out on my mom’s heels. The walls of the bathroom are tiled with ocean-washed glass in soft and dull blues, greens, and reds. I run the water in the bronze basin and splash some up on my face. When I glance into the mirror, I see that my cheeks are red as roses.

Dinner is served out on the deck, with our family sitting at a long, low table and the villa’s staff bringing us bowls of food: heaping piles of potato salad, sharp vinegary slaw, fish cooked with garlic and Scotch bonnets, and a bowl of dark, fragrant curry full of lumps of simmering meat.

I try to turn as the bowls are passed to me to smile at the villa staff, but no one will meet my eyes. The staff is a blur of dark faces and hands, the gleam of a coral-and-gold bracelet as a hand retracts the salad bowl I’m done eating from. “Thanks,” I say, but there is no response.

Phillip is forking up curry like it’s going out of style. “What is this?” he says abruptly, spearing a chunk of meat on his fork and shoving it in his mouth.

The tallest of the cooks, a woman with a sharp-boned face and a white kerchief tied around her hair, says, “It is goat curry, sir.”

Phillip spits the meat back onto his plate and grabs for a napkin, staring at the cook with accusing eyes.

I look down at the table, trying not to laugh.

The next day the heat is stunning, like a drug. I lie out on a lounger by the pool, the straps of my blue suit pushed down over my arms to avoid tan lines. My mom won’t let me buy a bikini. Phillip is sitting over in the shade reading a book called
Empire of Blue Water
. Evan is sitting with his feet in the pool, staring into space.

I attempt to catch his eye, but he won’t look at me, so I go back to my book. I try to read, but the words dance on the page like the sunlight dances over the pool water. This kind of weather makes everything dance.

Finally I put the book down and wander into the kitchen to get a Coke. The woman from last night, the tall cook who told Phillip he was eating goat, is standing by the sink washing up our dishes from breakfast. Today her headscarf is bright red, the color of a tropical bird.

She turns when she sees me. “What can I help you with, miss?” Her accent is as soft as flower petals.

“I just wanted a Coke.” I get the feeling I shouldn’t be in here, that the kitchen is the domain of the staff, even if all I want is a can of soda. Sure enough, instead of directing me toward the fridge, she retrieves the bottle herself, pops it open, and pours it into a glass for me.

“Thanks.” I take it, the cool glass feeling good against
my fingers. “What’s your name?”

“My name?” She raises her dark eyebrows. They’re perfect arches, like she plucks them every day. “I am Damaris.”

“Damaris and Damon,” I say, and then wish I hadn’t; I sound like a moron. Maybe she doesn’t even know Damon well.

“He is my brother,” she says, and glances out the window, a crease appearing between her brows. “
Your
brother has gone down to the beach, I see. You should tell him to stay away from the other houses along the road. Most of them are private, and not all of them are safe.”

Not safe?
I think.
As in guarded by vicious dogs or trigger-happy security guards?
But Damaris’s lovely, blank face gives away nothing. I set the empty glass on the sideboard. “Evan is my stepbrother,” I say as if it’s important; somehow I want her to know. “Not my brother.”

She says nothing.

“I’ll tell him to be careful,” I say.

The path that leads down to the water is sandy, fringed by rocks and scrubby grass. The beach arcs away to the south, lined with small, brightly painted houses in tropical colors: hot pink, acid green, frog-belly yellow. Ours is the last house, backed up against stone cliffs pocked with dark holes like raisins in a pale custard. I
think the holes must be caves.

Evan is nowhere on the beach. In fact, no one is on the beach. It’s a pale swatch of inviting sand that’s somehow totally empty. I’m surprised not to see anyone out sunbathing, but as I follow the curve of the sand along the water, I see that most of the other houses are shut and bolted up. Some have heavy padlocks on their gates. They seem dusty, disused. The only one that looks like it might be inhabited is a hot-pink house, the color of a rose blossom, one of the closest houses to the villa. Its huge yard stretches down to the sand, surrounded by a wall covered in mosaic tiles that depict waves and sea creatures. The top of the wall is lined with bits of glass—not small jagged bits of glass meant to discourage intruders but big chunks of square and rectangular glass reflecting back the sea and sky. I glance through the gate and see a riotous garden of brightly colored flowers, but the door to the house is shut, the window curtains pulled across.

I’m surprised by the lack of activity. We can’t be the only people staying in this area, can we? Travel brochures are always advertising “deserted beaches” as if it’s something really desirable, but in reality it’s kind of creepy. There are footsteps in the sand, so someone must have been walking here at some point, but there’s no one visible.

I reach the end of the beach, turn and walk back
toward the villa. The sun beats down heavily on my neck and shoulders. It’s cool up by the pool, but down here the heat feels like a heavy, wet blanket. I can see figures moving around up at the villa; they are black silhouettes outlined by the sun. As I near the path that leads back up through the scrub grass, a figure emerges from one of the holes in the rock.

It’s Evan. He isn’t wearing a shirt, just board shorts and flip-flops. His skin is as pale as mine is, but his wheat blond hair looks bright gold in the hot light. He has a few pale freckles splashed across his cheeks and nose, and I try to remember but can’t if those are new or if he’s always had them.

He looks surprised to see me. “Hey.”

“Hey,” I said, feeling, as I have since the wedding, stupid now that I’m around him. “Damaris told me to let you know that it isn’t safe down here.”

He squints, blue eyes against the sun. “Damaris?”

“The cook.”

“Oh, right.” He glances up and down the beach. “It looks safe to me. Maybe she meant there’s a riptide or something.”

I shrug. “Maybe.” She didn’t mean a riptide, but I don’t feel like getting into it.

“Come on.” He gestures at me to follow him. “I want to show you something.”

He ducks back into the dark opening in the rock and
I follow, swallowing down my claustrophobia. I have to hold my breath to squeeze through a narrow passage, and then we come out in a larger space. Dim rays from outside spill through the opening slit in the stone, but they’re not all that’s providing illumination here: patches of glowing brightness are dotted here and there on the damp cave walls, and they’re different colors too: ice blue and pale green and sheer rose. “Phosphorescent moss,” Evan says. He runs his hand along the wall then shows the palm of it to me; it shines like the bright fin of a fish. “See?”

His eyes are glowing too, in the darkness. I remember the first time I ever saw Evan loping across the quad at school with his bag slung over his shoulder, his bright hair shining in the sunlight. He moved like someone with purpose, like there was a shimmering, invisible road only he could see and his feet were on it and he knew where he was going. I’d never seen him before—it turned out later he was new that year, having moved to town with his dad from Portland—and he didn’t look like any boy I’d ever liked. I went for the hipster boys: worn jeans and glasses and serious hair. Evan was clean and sporty and he shone like gold in the sunlight, and from that moment I wanted him like I had never wanted anyone before.

Now I touch my fingers to his; they come away glowing, as if he’s transferring his light to me. He tenses when
we touch, and then his fingers wrap around mine. My toes dig into the sand as I go on tiptoe, reaching my face up to his, and then he’s kissing me, and his mouth is damp and soft. His fingers dig tightly into my shoulders before he breaks away. “Vi,” he says, and it’s more of a groan than anything else. “We can’t.”

I know what he means. We went over all this before, the night in the garden, when we kissed and then fought for hours.
We have to tell them we can’t tell them we can’t do this they don’t need to know of course they’ll find out they’ll kill us he’ll kill me no. No.

Evan moves past me toward the cave entrance and slithers out through it. I follow him, saying his name, squeezing through the narrow slit in the rock after him, and the strap of my bathing suit gets caught on a sharp piece of jutting rock, which is why it takes me a moment to untangle myself then join Evan on the beach. He’s standing there, staring down the beach with his mouth open. When I follow his gaze, I see why.

There’s a woman coming out of the pink house. She pushes open the blue-painted iron gate and walks out onto the sand. Except she doesn’t just walk. She moves like a wave. Her hips roll, and her hair, which is long and white blond, ripples like foam on the sea. She’s wearing a sort of printed sarong. It’s split down one side, and you can see the whole of her perfectly tanned leg when she walks. She’s got on a white bikini top, and the way
she fills it out makes me want to cross my arms over my chest to hide how flat I am. She holds a bottle in one hand, the sort that my Coca-Cola came in earlier, though there’s no label on it.

She pushes her glasses on her head as she comes close to us, and any hope I had that her face wouldn’t match the rest of her vanishes. She’s beautiful. Evan is just staring.

“You’re the children from the villa,” she says. She has a faint, indefinable accent. “Aren’t you?”

Evan looks dismayed at being called a child. “I guess so.”

She tilts the bottle in her hand. It’s filled with a pale liquid that glows with an odd rainbow sheen in the sunlight. “It must be dull for you, being here in the off-season,” she says. “Hardly anyone around. Except me. I’m here all the time.” She smiles. “I’m Mrs. Palmer. Anne Palmer. Feel free to stop by my house if you need anything.”

Evan doesn’t look like he’s about to speak so I do. “Thanks,” I say stiffly, thinking that she doesn’t look like an Anne. Anne is a plain, friendly name. “But we have everything we need.”

Her lips curl up slightly at the corners, like burning paper. “No one has everything they need.”

I reach to touch Evan on the shoulder. “We should get back to the house.”

But he ignores me; he’s looking at Mrs. Palmer. She’s still smiling. “You know,” she says, “you look like a nice, strong boy. I could use your help. I’ve got an old car—a classic, as they say—and it usually runs like a dream, but lately I’ve been having trouble starting it. Would you take a look at it for me?”